Graceful degradation enables a computer, electronic machine, system or network to maintain a limited functionality of the environment even when a major part of the system has been destroyed or is non-functional. The prime objective of graceful degradation is to prevent tragic failures. In general, even the simultaneous loss of a number of components do not cause failure to the operation of the system with their general features. When we talk about graceful degradation, the efficiency or the speed of the system declines gradually as more components continue to fail.
The Design Trend
The Graceful degradation is an important designing aspect and also in the implementation of very large communication networks. In today’s time, the internet continues to maintain the consistent approach of being always accessible and not prone to any major failures that might lead to heavy impacts worldwide. Sometimes, malicious electronic activities or different forms of viruses, worms, unauthenticated of services and attacks result in considerable disruption of the services.
Graceful degradation is often considered to be equivalent to the fault tolerance capability of the system. However, there is a significant difference. The purpose of designing Fault-tolerant systems is that if any component fails or a network route becomes unusable, a backup component, a different procedure or the route can immediately have any alternative with no negative impact on individual experience. The graceful degradation is an effective fault management approach deals with the component of network management concerned with detecting, and resolving the problems.
The Actual Meaning Of Graceful Degradation
When we talk specifically about the graceful degradation from web designing perspective, it refers to the sensible implementation of various new and sophisticated features which ensure that most of the Internet users can interact with pages of the site. A positive approach towards graceful degradation is that whenever an updated version of any browser or operating system is out, most of the features are often added to keep the latest features of the internet. Due to a number of reasons, many Internet users still prefer to continue using existing browsers instead of immediately upgrading to the latest version with updates on website technologies. It is only required to update browsers only when they browse through very old ones.
